1,382 stories by "Tony Frankel"
ON ANASTASIA, AMNESIA, AND ANESTHESIA First came the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, who was murdered in 1918 just after the Bolshevi…
CINDERFELLA The best play on any L.A. stage right now, Daniel Pearle's 2013 A Kid Like Jake couldn't be more relevant. The parents of a four-year-old boy are applying for a private primary s…
SHEPARDING OUT THE TRUTH Sam Shepard's domestic disruption True West hasn't left the theatrical landscape since it first premiered with Peter Coyote at San Francisco's Magic Theater in 1980.…
ON THE BORDERLINE What do a Latino cop, a black vet in the Bronx, a Saudi Arabian without a country, a gay pagan goat rancher, and a homeless HIV-positive man have in common? Dan Hoyle. SF's…
WHAT LIES BURIED Actor Hamish Linklater's funny, sharp and tender play The Vandal begins on a cold winter night as a down-on-her-luck middle-aged woman waits for a bus on a deserted street. …
THE CORE IS THERE, BUT THE POSE IS OFF Not only is yoga a gentle exercise and a Hindu spiritual discipline, it's also an $83 billion international industry. Meet Joan (Susi Damilano), a new …
YOU'RE THE TOP, GIRLS For the most part, Joyce, a working class Englishwoman in Ipswich is not a sympathetic or likeable person: She is annoyed by her teenage daughter Angie (who admittedly …
A PRODUCTION WITH SOLID LIFE Phil and Alice are in love, the kind of messy, well-known, commonplace love that many couples are familiar with. They meet cute in a post office when a package f…
CHANGE IS NOW We hear that that the only thing constant is change, yet we struggle against change, we fight against change, and some are even willing to succumb to the unyielding stress of d…
MORON THAT NOW One-man stage phenom John Leguizamo, who has popularized the stories of his Columbian/Puerto Rican/Bronx Ghetto peeps and their culture in semi-autobiographical shows Mambo Mo…
A PITCH FOR THIS RICH WITCH Written by Jen Silverman and directed by Marti Lyons, Witch is inspired by William Rowley's Jacobian 1621 play Witch of Edmonton. The classic story follows Eli…
SHREK IS A SHRUG OF A MUSICAL; BUT THIS PRODUCTION IS SURE AND SHARP Shrek The Musical is a mystifying experience. The whole thing is rather inane, versus the sophisticated silliness of Funn…
GIVE US A SECOND ACT WE DESERVE; ALL WE END UP WITH IS SCRAPS The angry young man syndrome is nothing new " think Protestant reformer Martin Luther! " but it sure found a home in the theater…
A RESONATING STORY It rarely happens. "The Broadway Chill" I call it. That moment when an already amazing show is given the perfect and unexpected staging which heightens emotion, inducing m…
THRIVING WOODS Somewhere between "Once Upon a Time" and "Happily Ever After" there is a very adult world of tests, losses, disappointments, and grief. Despite this, we assert our agency; or …
LESSER LOESSER Well, here's a jukebox musical just bursting at the seams with promise. And North Coast Rep's production of Another Roll of the Dice is definitely kinda cute, a far cry from t…
IT USED TO BE A MISS; NOW, THE HEAT IS ON IN SAIGON Infinitely stronger than the original Broadway outing, this national tour of Miss Saigon overcomes a still strangely muddled plot, some aw…
DESPEREAUX TIMES CALL FOR DESPEREAUX MEASURES More precious than profound, this new family musical is pure children's theater with multilayered storytelling and plenty of songs that aid in e…
NO SHIT, SHERLOCK As with Good Boys playing across town, Mysterious Circumstances doesn't quite give us an ending the material deserves, but hoo-boy what a ride this is. Directed by Matt Sha…
THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A DAMES When Dames at Sea opened in 1966 at the Caffe Cino, a small coffee house and performance space in New York City's Greenwich Village that was at the heart of the…
FOUL AND FAIR Shakespeare's Macbeth, or The Tragedy of Macbeth, is typically dated to the years immediately following the coronation of James I as King of England in 1603. James, who w…
A PUNCH IN THE GUT Raw as realism requires, good plays about boxing are more than just Rocky slugfests. Like Clifford Odets' seminal Golden Boy, they transform an atavistic popular dis…
YOU'RE GETTING TO BE A RABBIT WITH ME Whatever happened to all the imaginary friends we had as kids? Did they all end up in some limbo where they started making friends with each other, or, …
HAS TOLSTOY EVER BEEN SO HOT? In his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Anna in the Tropics, Nilo Cruz created the role of striking, velvet-voiced, Cuban Lothario Juan Julian, a lector who is h…
A PERFECT FIT Jason Robert Brown's The Last Five Years is contextually brilliant: it is a two-character musical that starts at the end of a five-year relationship for the woman, Cathy, but a…
